[whatwg] Singular CTM and currentTransform

[Justin Novosad]

On Tue, Mar 25, 2014 at 8:25 AM, Dirk Schulze <dschulze at adobe.com> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> Independent if getter getTransform/getCTM or attribute currentTransform,
> what should be returned for a CTM that is singular (not invertible)?
>
> In WebKit we do not track all transformations of the CTM that caused a
> singular matrix or are following a transformation that would have caused a
> singular matrix.
>
> Example:
>
> ctx.scale(0,0);
> ct.translate(10,10);
>
> In webkit we would not apply the transformation scale(0,0) and mark the
> CTM as not-invertible instead. So we could not return an SVGMatrix object
> with a = b = c = d = 0; e = f = 10 because we actually don’t know the CTM
> after applying all transforms.
>
> I would suggest that the getter either:
> 1) throws and invalid state error if the CTM is not invertible
> 2) returns 0. In WebIDLit would look like: SVGMatrix? getTransform();
>
> Greetings,
> Dirk
>

The notion that an invertible matrix is an unusable state is somewhat of a
webkit-ism.  I think there is a prerequisite question that needs to be
resolved before we can ponder what you propose: should we proceed with draw
operations when the canvas is non-invertible?  Right now some browsers do
and some don't. The current state of the spec suggests that webkit/blink
are *not* doing the right thing.  In another thread we discussed skipping
path primitives (and presumably all draw calls) when the matrix is
non-invertible. We should probably finalize that issue first.


> PS: This is one reason I prefer a getter over an attribute because the
> getter does not return a mutable (live) SVGMatrix. But even than the
> problem above is not fully solved of course.